I mentioned in a previous post that some things were changing around these parts. Today marks the completion of Operation: Blog Overhaul. Here’s the short-n-skinny of it:
(Before I continue: I hate “meta” blog posts as much as the next guy and I’m really embarrassed about how frequently I’ve posted on this blog about this blog. It’s annoying and I promise you this will be the last post of its kind for awhile. I hope, anyway. Thanks for bearing with me.)
In my Internet travels, I come across a fair number of things (posts on other blogs, news articles and the like) that I’d like to share with my readers. Trouble is, Twitter doesn’t afford me enough space to offer the proper commentary on many of these links, so I’ve decided to incorporate them into this blog in the form of the Linked List.
Readers of sites like The Brooks Review, Shawn Blanc and Daring Fireball will be familiar with this concept. Basically, I’m going to be posting to this blog a good deal more, but many of the posts will be links to other Internet stuff coupled with a bit of commentary by yours truly. I’ll still be posting post-length, original articles here regularly, so don’t worry about that part going away. I just wanted a way to share my thoughts on other things that included a bit more room for me to splash around, so to speak.
(Incidentally, I wouldn’t be a very good copycat if I didn’t set up automatic syndication of all of the site’s content to its own dedicated Twitter account, so you can now follow @nerdgap to get links to everything I publish here, both links and articles.)
This functionality has forced me to realize that, no matter how awesome the Headway theme for WordPress is, I needed to be able to dink around with the core of the theme itself. So, this site is now running a heavily customized version of the Starkers theme, which I was able to put together in a couple of hours. I’m serious, though — if you’re in the market for a fab WordPress setup and don’t need to be wrist-deep in PHP, Headway is a damn fine solution.
Oh, and if the linky business doesn’t appeal to you, I’ve set up a separate RSS feed just for the longer-form articles that have made up the whole of this site thus far. Check out the feeds page for more info.
Identity Crisis
I won’t lie to you — I’ve never felt like this blog has a very strong “editorial focus”. My posts vary from technology to productivity to something bordering on “life improvement”, often a mixture of several things. Thing is, I’m really interested in many things and don’t want to just post about technology or productivity or any one thing. So, I’m not going to. In an effort to avoid what Marco Arment calls The Blogger Trap, I’m not going to pin myself down to any one topic or series of topics.
Yes, I’m still going to write about OmniFocus, Evernote, Apple and lots of other tech- and efficiency-related topics, but this new shift means you’ll also find posts dealing with (and links to articles about) things like coffee, whiskey, online business and whatever else happens to strike my fancy.
I’ve always tried to make the thesis of this blog to be fairly simple: be informative, helpful, thought-provoking and/or entertaining. It’s anybody’s guess as to whether or not I’ve achieved this in the past, but I’m assuming that the people who regularly read this site do so—at least, in part—because they are interested in what I have to say about things. Hell, I read just about everything that John Gruber and Marco Arment write, even though many of the topics they choose to cover hold little allure for me. I like the way they write. More than a few of you have emailed me saying similar things about my stuff (which is humbling — thank you).
So, from now on, you get me: a goofy nerd who makes up words and occasionally swears and likes exactly what he likes. I hope that’s cool.
Other Changes
Comments are gone. I love the interaction they provide, but a big part of what makes this whole global community thing so awesome is that we can all participate in the conversation from our own respective dwellings. If you think I’m full of crap or you enjoy what I have to say and would like to add to it, let me know by posting to your own blog and linking back here. This serves to nicely decentralize the conversation and let people express their own thoughts in their own way and not limit things to a goofy comment thread that will die within hours.
Alternately, you can always email me and let me know what you think of something I’ve written; I’ve just come to believe that in-house comments are less than beneficial.
Last Thing
Lots and lots of you have signed up for the newsletter which, I’m ashamed to admit, has been neglected up until recently. That’s changed. My longer-form posts will now be split evenly between this blog and the newsletter. So, if you want to keep up with everything I’ve got to say, then signing up for the newsletter would be a great idea.
Thanks
I know there are pantloads of blogs out there and the fact that you’d take the time to read this one is, well, nice. I’m glad you find what I have to say worthwhile and I hope you stick with me.
